Q: In SM
101, Jay Wiseman recommends that it's easier for a het male to meet
someone and gradually introduce her into SM than it is to find the mistress or
submissive of his dreams at the local bar or supermarket. Do you agree or disagree? I
prefer to find my relationships in the vanilla world rather than in the BDSM
community anyway. But because of what I have in store for the other person, and
because I assume that if she is not receptive to my plans I will drop her, I feel guilty
about what seems like an unfair and dishonest approach to looking for a partner. How
hard is it to start with a vanilla relationship and then add SM to it?

A: I actually have known a couple of men who claimed they found the Mistresses of
their dreams in just these sorts of ways -- one by chatting up a woman sitting literally
on the next barstool who turned out to have a whip in her purse that she knew how to
use, the other by catching the eye of a woman walking her dog and asking if she
treated men that way. Nonetheless, out of all the men I've known two is not a lot, and
I've never heard of anyone finding a ready-made submissive on the checkout line.
Even though I don't have a statistically valid study for reference, I would certainly
agree with Jay that the likelihood of finding SM bliss on this sort of chance meeting is
extremely slim, and far, far slimmer than the likelihood that someone you meet in
vanilla-land might be amenable to learning -- as you once were and as I once was and
as practically everyone in Janus once was. I'd guess this is true even though some
people simply do not seem to be able to comprehend safe and sane no matter how
many times the concepts are explained, and when they hear about BDSM only think of
undesirable chain and unbearable pain and nonconsensual servitude, and are just never
going to be players.

Still, deliberately introducing someone vanilla into SM can be a painstaking process,
and one likely to challenge your abilities as a trainer whether you think of yourself as
a top or a bottom. To some significant extent, then, I think your success in finding an
SM-compatible partner in or out of the scene depends on who you are, who she is,
and how compatible you are together: training is always a team effort. As you might
imagine, I generally agree that honesty is a better policy than guile. But self-disclosure
is very much part of a coming out process, and I have always felt that the way, time,
and place a person comes out is best left to him or her, providing the result is not
intended to harm others.

In introducing this set of fruit-fudge-and-nut-like flavors to your prospective vanilla
cone, a great deal may hinge on the way you broach the subject. It is a rare individual,
top or bottom, in or out of the scene, who is going to be wholeheartedly enthusiastic
about playing with you in any way, SM or otherwise, if the first thing out of your
mouth after your name is the kind of scene you want. Not only would s/he be rare, but
the evidence of his or her over-eagerness, like the evidence of your own, would
suggest that this person is willing to play unsafely as well as unwisely. The very thing
you may want in your hungry fantasies -- an immediate piece of action -- is actually
the very thing you don't want if you're looking for the kind of relationship whose SM
will last over a long term. Once someone has gotten to know you, however, and feels
that you have some understanding of her as well, you are both in better positions to
gauge the other as a fit. If you like each other in the relevant ways, if you want
related things out of the experiences you might share, if you have the skills she needs
to learn and the patience and ability to teach them, and if the person you're
approaching is at least willing to try a little something new, then you can decide if
you want to introduce your sort of SM to her, or if you'd be better off taking in a
movie.

A great deal also has to do with what you can offer your prospective partner.
Obviously, the more you know about your scene the better you can explain its
dynamics, and the more helpful you can be in explaining to your wide-eyed innocent
what you get out of it and what your prospective partner might look for if she agrees
to play with you. But what you have to offer may not only be your scene
sophistication. Your capacity for intimacy and your willingness expose your feelings
may be more important in establishing trust between you and your new friend than
your skill at slinging a flogger. Your familiarity with energy exchange may function as
a bridge to understanding some of SM's deeper dynamics for someone who already
understands about energy exchanges in other sorts of ways such as in physics or in art.
Your ability to have fun with costume, music, and dungeon drama can enhance her
experience of fun, while also minimizing some of the dire emotions all the black
leather and nasty-looking toys are sometimes designed to elicit. Your skills at boating,
rock climbing, or emergency room triage open worlds of discussion that lead to
valuations about flagellation and bondage. Your extensive experience giving or taking
commands in a hierarchical profession, or while practicing a spiritual discipline,
provides you with deep training in giving and receiving service.

And of course a great deal of your success will be related to the nature of the SM you
enjoy. Obviously, if you like things that pique her interest she'll be more likely to
want to explore with you than if your negotiated needs and desires are far apart. But
also, if you want to enjoy an occasional spanking, whether as top or bottom, the
number of nominally vanilla folk who would be quite pleased to accommodate may be
surprisingly high. Once you make clear to her that spanking is not a punishment for
misdeeds -- or else show her how to find the delight in such misbehavior and its
recompense -- the intimacy of being over your knee, combined with your hand softly
(at first) caressing her bared ass, may prove a sweet inspiration to an otherwise
frightened or uninterested novice.

Finally, politeness, courtesy, and the ability to listen to another person's questions and
concerns are far more likely to land you an appropriate partner than all the technical
skills in the world.

For my part, I think it's always better to have no scene than a bad scene, but I know
that sometimes when people get extremely hungry to play they can feel ready to leap
on anyone who resembles their fantasies in any way. Since virtually everyone, top or
bottom, will go to great lengths to please others whom we like, love, admire, or
revere, as we will go to great lengths to avoid getting caught displeasing those we
fear, this is exactly where bad scenes often take place, simply because the player who
should have known better -- that's you, in this case -- forgot his basic negotiation skills.

William A. Henkin, a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and a Board Certified
Sex Therapist, is co-author, with Sybil Holiday, of Consensual Sadomasochism: How
to Talk About It and How to Do It Safely. He conducts his private psychotherapy
practice in San Francisco.